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To the modern rationalist, looking at things in the dry light of history, it may seem that this doctrine was only the Puritan's own appeal to individual judgment, stated in different form; but the Puritan could not so regard it. To such a fanatic as Norton this inward light was but a reflection from the glare of the bottomless pit, this private inspiration was the beguiling voice of the Devil.
Plato, by the mouth of Socrates, rejects a rationalist interpretation of this myth. According to this explanation, an outward, natural fact is poetically symbolised by the narrative. A hurricane seized the king's daughter and hurled her over the rocks.
Robertson lays down the law pretty confidently about the blunders of everybody about him Tractarian, Evangelical, Dissenter, Romanist, and Rationalist. We must say that the impression of every page of his letters is, that clear and "intuitive" as he was, he had not always understood what he condemned.
You will find if you care to look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book museums, the shriveled cheap publications the publications of the Rationalist Press Association, for example on which my arguments were based. Lying in that curious limbo with them, mixed up with them and indistinguishable, are the endless "Replies" of orthodoxy, like the mixed dead in some hard-fought trench.
For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just WHY we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of DENYING truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it.
On the completion of his studies at home, he repaired, thirsting for deeper draughts of knowledge, to Paris; and became one of the most devoted scholars of Abailard; whose rationalist invasions of the domain of theological doctrine, by which the supreme authority of the Church in matters of faith was threatened, accorded with Arnold's tone of mind.
There is a touch of the sour-grapes philosophy in the rationalist attitude on this matter which Mr. Wells attributes to his Invisible King. Because we can't have any miracles, we say we don't want them.
An excellent remedy for the nonsense which still clings about religion may be found in two books: Cotter Monson's 'Service of Man, which was published as long ago as 1887, and has since been re-issued by the Rationalist Press Association in its well-known sixpenny series, and J. Allanson Picton's 'Man and the Bible. Similarly, those who wish to acquire a sane view of the relations between man and God would do well to read Winwood Reade's 'Martyrdom of Man."
What are you going to do with the cross? 'Lock it up as safely as I can, I said; 'what else is there to do with it? He looked into my face and said, 'You are a rationalist. 'I am. 'You do not believe in a supernatural world? 'My disbelief of it, I said, 'is something more than an exercise of the reason. It is a passion, an angry passion.
In religion he was a rationalist, a sceptic, whether he would or no; but he recoiled from the maze of "anxious thoughts" which spread before him, of thoughts "that in endless circles roll without a centre where to fix the soul," and clung to the Church that would give him, if not peace, at least quiet.
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